Narrator: In the summer of 1991, a college student named Alec Ross spent his nights mopping floors. As part of the janitorial crew at the Charleston Civic Center in West Virginia, he cleaned up after country music concerts, a stark contrast to his friends' prestigious internships. His coworkers were a tough, beaten-down bunch, their lives a testament to the decline of the region's coal and chemical industries. That experience planted a seed of understanding about the brutal realities of economic disruption. Years later, as a senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Ross saw the other side of the coin: how technology and globalization were lifting billions out of poverty in places like India and China. This stark contrast between the winners and losers of the last economic wave poses a critical question: what forces will shape the next 20 years, and how can we prepare for them? In his book, The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross provides a guide to the next wave of change, exploring the groundbreaking advances that will redefine our economies, our societies, and our very lives.

Narrator: The book begins by establishing a fundamental truth: globalization and innovation create both winners and losers. The last wave, driven by the internet and automation, lifted over a billion people in developing nations from poverty into the middle class. Countries like India and China leveraged their low-cost labor to become economic powerhouses. Yet, this same wave devastated industrial centers in the developed world. Ross uses his home state of West Virginia as a poignant case study. Once a thriving hub built on coal and chemicals, the state’s economy crumbled as mechanization replaced miners and globalization moved factories to cheaper locations. His mother used to say the foul smell from the chemical plants was "the smell of money," a sentiment that captured the old economy's trade-off between prosperity and pollution. By the time Ross was in college, the only secure jobs left were the ones he was doing—cleaning up messes. This history illustrates the uneven impact of progress, setting the stage for the next wave of innovation, which Ross warns will challenge not just industrial workers, but the middle classes in established economies across the globe.

Narrator: The first industry of the future is robotics, and its arrival is driven as much by necessity as by innovation. Japan provides a compelling example. With a rapidly aging population and a shrinking workforce, the country faces a critical shortage of eldercare workers. Strict immigration policies mean there are few people to fill the gap. In response, Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda are pioneering the development of caretaking robots. Machines like Robina and RIBA are designed to assist with daily tasks, lift patients, and even provide companionship, like the therapeutic baby harp seal robot, PARO. This illustrates a future where robots become integral members of the family system.

However, the rise of robotics also brings profound economic disruption. The story of Foxconn, the massive electronics manufacturer, shows the other side of the coin. In 2011, facing rising labor costs and criticism over working conditions, founder Terry Gou announced a plan to purchase one million robots to supplement his human workforce. The economic calculation was simple: a robot costing $25,000 was a capital expense that could replace a human worker's ongoing salary. This trend, Ross argues, is not just about automating dangerous or difficult jobs, but about replacing human labor in routine tasks, from manufacturing to the service sector.

Narrator: The next great frontier is not in silicon, but in our own genetic code. The field of genomics is poised to become a trillion-dollar industry, and its potential is captured in the remarkable story of Dr. Lukas Wartman. An oncologist himself, Wartman was battling a fatal relapse of leukemia. With all standard treatments exhausted, his colleagues at Washington University took a radical step: they sequenced his cancer's genome. The analysis revealed a specific mutation in a gene called FLT3 that was driving the cancer's growth. Armed with this knowledge, they treated him with Sutent, a kidney cancer drug known to inhibit that specific gene. Within weeks, Wartman's cancer went into remission.

This case is a powerful demonstration of precision medicine. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach like chemotherapy, doctors can now tailor treatments to an individual's unique genetic makeup. The cost of sequencing a genome has plummeted from billions to thousands of dollars, making this technology increasingly accessible. This is leading to innovations like "liquid biopsies," simple blood tests that can detect cancer DNA at its earliest stages, and research into the genetic roots of mental illness. However, this power also brings ethical dilemmas, raising the specter of "designer babies" and forcing society to grapple with the profound consequences of being able to read and rewrite the code of life itself.

Narrator: Money, markets, and trust are being fundamentally transformed by computer code. This shift is vividly illustrated by the creation of Square. In 2009, glassblower Jim McKelvey lost a $2,000 sale because he couldn't process an American Express card. Frustrated, he shared his story with his friend Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. Together, they created Square, a simple device that plugs into a smartphone, allowing small businesses to accept credit cards with ease and at a lower cost. Square eliminated the friction and intermediaries that made commerce difficult for the "little guy."

This code-ification of markets is having an even more profound impact in the developing world. In Kenya, where traditional banking is scarce, the M-Pesa mobile payment system has become a lifeline. It allows millions to send, receive, and save money via simple text messages, with an estimated 25 percent of the country's GNP flowing through the network. This digital trust also has the power to combat corruption. Ross recounts his team's effort at the State Department to pay Congolese soldiers directly via mobile phone, bypassing corrupt generals who skimmed from cash payrolls. While the initiative faced immense resistance, it proved that coded payments could create a more transparent and trustworthy system.

Narrator: The same code that builds markets can also be weaponized. The world has entered a "Code War," a new domain of conflict where the weapons are digital and the battlefields are our networks. The 2012 Shamoon virus attack on Saudi Aramco, the world's largest energy company, serves as a chilling example. Believed to be the work of Iran, the virus was delivered on a USB drive by a rogue insider. It spread through the company’s network, wiping the hard drives of over 30,000 computers and replacing the data with an image of a burning American flag. The attack was not for profit; it was designed purely for destruction, forcing the company to shut down its network and physically replace tens of thousands of hard drives.

This weaponization of code takes many forms. Confidentiality attacks, like the 2013 Target breach that stole data from 40 million customers, aim to steal information. Availability attacks, like the denial-of-service campaigns Russia launched against Estonia and Georgia, aim to shut down critical systems. As the Internet of Things connects everything from cars to refrigerators, the potential targets for such attacks multiply, creating unprecedented vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity has therefore become one of the fastest-growing and most critical industries of the future.

Narrator: In the 21st century, a nation's competitiveness will be defined less by its natural resources and more by its openness. The book presents a stark contrast between two former Soviet republics: Estonia and Belarus. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Estonia embraced radical openness. It opened its economy to the world, privatized state industries, and, crucially, made internet access a human right. It invested heavily in education, teaching coding from the first grade. Today, Estonia is a thriving, high-tech nation, the birthplace of Skype, and a leader in digital governance.

Belarus chose the opposite path. It remained a closed, authoritarian state, a "remnant of the 1970s" with a state-controlled economy and suppressed freedoms. The result has been economic stagnation. This tale of two countries illustrates the central argument: in an interconnected world, control-freak tendencies are a recipe for failure. The most successful societies will be those that are open to new people, new ideas, and new technologies, and that empower all their citizens—especially women—to participate in the economy.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Industries of the Future is that we are at a critical inflection point, and the choices we make now—as individuals, communities, and nations—will determine our prosperity in the coming decades. The book is ultimately a call to action, framed through the lens of the most important job any of us will ever have: being a parent. Ross argues that to prepare our children for this new world, we must equip them with a new set of fluencies. They need multicultural fluency to navigate a globalized world, technical fluency to build and command the tools of the future, and analytical skills to manage the complex systems that robots and AI cannot.

The challenge, therefore, is not just personal but societal. How do we reform our educational systems to foster this interdisciplinary mindset? And more importantly, how do we ensure that the immense opportunities created by these future industries are extended to everyone, not just a privileged few, so that no one is left behind to simply mop the floors of the new economy?